Part of the calculus which led Aftermath to build on Sui was how well-suited it is for GameFi. Beyond speed, scalability, and low-cost, Sui has many native features which lend themselves well both to game builders and to onboarding new users to Web3. From Sui Move itself, to programmable and sponsored transactions, zkLogin, to Kiosks and Token standards, there are a plethora of tools in the builder’s kit to create truly enjoyable blockchain games.

We have always desired to build products which cater to this sector of the Sui ecosystem. For one thing, NFTs and GameFi are great demonstrators of Sui’s tech and of what makes Sui stand out from other blockchains. As a team that has been building on Sui for two years now, we feel Aftermath has a role to play in providing GameFi infrastructure that newcomers can quickly pick up and use. That way, teams coming over to Sui who don’t know the tech inside and out, but know games, have a variety of tools to choose from to quickly bring their vision to life.

We have also come to realize that the community around NFTs and gaming are a lot of fun to interact with. Whether it was our Sui Frens Capy staking vaults we deployed on testnet a year ago, or more recently with our Eggs, it has been enjoyable to build things which cater to a different crowd than our core DeFi products typically do. We are excited to present the NFT AMM and the many ways it can be used and to hear the ideas the community has for it that even we haven’t thought of yet.

Architecture

What we call the NFT AMM for the sake of brevity is really two core pieces of infrastructure which can be used either in tandem or separately dependending upon the intended application. While NFT AMMs have existed before, primarily in the EVM world, these examples are a specific and fairly narrow implementation of how the infrastructure we have built can be used. Like our Pools and Farms, the NFT AMM will be permissionless, allowing anyone to create and deploy NFT vaults and pools however they see fit. We do not anticipate the primary use of this infrastructure to be to fractionalize and trade existing or future NFT collections however. Rather, we see NFT fractionalization, pools, farms, NFT and Token transfer rules being used together to drive the supply and demand mechanics of complex game economies.

Fission Vaults

Fractionalization of NFTs into coins or tokens, and redemption of coins for NFTs is handled by Fission vaults. These vaults are highly customizable to allow them to serve whatever use case NFT and game builders have in mind for their project. Vault attributes which can be custom-tailored include:

Kiosk compliance: Kiosks allow creators of digital assets to set and enforce certain rules about how their assets can be used. Creators can leverage Kiosks in numerous ways to set parameters regarding how, when, and according to what conditions objects may be transferred. By adhering to the rules of the Kiosk, Fission vaults allow their full functionality to be available for use in game design.

Coins and Tokens: The Coin and Token standards on Sui allow further specification of how fractionalized NFTs can be used. An NFT can be fractionalized into Coins which are freely tradeable and fungible, providing freedom to their holders to do with them as they please. For certain use cases, it may be desirable to limit where and how fractionalized NFTs can be used. For these purposes, creators can use the Token standard to ensure the rules they desire are followed.

Fractionalization into multiple tokens: NFTs can have a wide range of attributes, from rarity tiers to how they appear or potentially how they can be used. Rather than limit all NFTs from a collection to being fractionalized into a specific number of a certain coin, it is possible to specify that a NFT with attributes A, B, and C gets fractionalized into arbitrary amounts of tokens X, Y, and Z. Likewise, it can be specified that an NFT requires certain amounts of numerous tokens to be redeemed from the vault. Game and NFT creators can set up Fission vaults however they wish in order to implement a system which works for their project.

Farming: A Fission vault can also behave similarly to our Afterburner vaults currently in use as farms for our AMM pools. Rather than depositing an NFT and instantly receiving some amount of fractionalized NFT coins, NFTs can be staked into the vault, which will then allow users to claim some amount of coins according to a specified emissions rate.

Depreciation: The inverse of farming. An NFT staked into a Fission vault may initially be worth some amount of fractionalized tokens, which decreases over time. The vault can simultaneously emit other tokens, allowing the spending of one token in order to farm another. This also allows for the use and repair of NFTs over time.

Gated vaults: Requires a user to hold a specific asset in order to access the vault. Vaults can also only be available at specific times, for example only during a particular season.

Minting and Burning: It may be desired for an asset to be able to be utilized one time and then destroyed, rather than leaving it staked in the vault to be redeemed or purchased. For these purposes, Fission vaults can mint and burn NFTs, coins, or tokens as specified by the vault creator.

Depositing to the AMM: Fission vaults also can determine whether fractionalized NFTs are deposited directly into the AMM for trading, or if the user has the option to instead receive the coins to their wallet, or perform some other operation with them.

We are excited to see the creative ways builders come up with to utilize Fission vaults. One of the reasons we wanted to build them is to spread awareness about the various tools Game and NFT creators have at their disposal on Sui. By supplying the infrastructure, Aftermath can allow creators to do what they do best, which is to invent immersive experiences with the building blocks available to them.

NFT AMM

The second core component of our GameFi infrastructure is the NFT AMM itself. A modification of our existing Pools architecture, it inherits many of its unique features which provide even more freedom for builders. Key attributes of the NFT AMM pools include:

Pools of up to 8 assets: Unlike most AMM pools which can only trade pairs, our AMM supports up to 8 assets in a single pool. This is particularly interesting for gaming, as pooling multiple assets together will directly affect their relative values, creating interesting supply and demand effects within the game.

Arbitrary weights: Each asset within the pool can have any weight so long as they all add up to 100. A pool with two assets at equal weights, or up to 8 all at different weights, is possible.

LP Tokens: NFT AMM pools may emit an LP token if desired. These LP tokens can be freely traded, staked into a farm, or used in whatever way the pool creator wishes to allow them to be used.

Price discovery: The NFT AMM provides an alternative method of price discovery for NFTs beyond the typical marketplace model. Like any standard AMM for coins, these pools can be used to swap from one asset to another, and also allow anyone to speculate on a collection and earn fees from trading activity by providing liquidity.

Permissionless creation: Anyone can create an NFT AMM pool for any collection they wish.

Invitation to Builders

We are excited to offer this new GameFi infrastructure to the Sui community, and look forward to speaking with any teams who are intrigued by the possibilities it presents. There is so much untapped potential for NFT collections to issue tokens which can be used in innovative ways, and for games to fully integrate tradeable digital assets which truly add to the experience.

Be sure to check out our documents for tutorials on how to try out the NFT AMM on testnet. We will be offering a bounty and technical support to participants of the Sui Overflow hackathon who build with our NFT AMM, so please reach out to us if you have any questions!

Originally published at https://medium.com on April 15, 2024.

2023 was a momentous year for Aftermath and our community, so we wanted to go back and highlight the achievements we are most proud of. We are grateful for those who have been with us from the start or have joined us along the way. Building great products is our mandate, but none of it matters if our community doesn’t find what we build to be useful to them.

Aftermath was founded in September 2022, and we spent the rest of the year assembling our developer team, researching, and defining our priorities for the coming year. FTX imploding made it a fantastic time to launch a new protocol on a new blockchain (/s), but it also reinforced our thesis that a fully on-chain exchange, which offers the convenience of a centralized exchange, was needed and worthwhile to attempt to build. So that’s what we set out to do.

We have come a long way since one year ago, both Aftermath and the greater Web3 community as a whole. We persevered through the FUD we all faced at the end of 2022, put our heads down and built, and we’re thrilled about the solid foundation we have created going into 2024. Below are just a few of our milestones, in chronological order, that we’ve accomplished over the past year:

1. AMM v1 [Devnet Launch]
2. Capy Staking [Testnet Wave 2]
3. Router v1 [Testnet Launch]
4. Validator Genesis Ceremony [Mainnet]
5. First Contract Ever Published on Sui Mainnet
6. AMM v1 & Router v1 [Mainnet Launch]
7. afSUI v0.1 [Testnet Launch]
8. SIP6 (First SIP)
9. Found Bug in DeepBook
10. LSD Hackathon
11. afSUI v1 [Mainnet Launch]
12. Dynamic Gas [Mainnet Launch]
13. Perps [Testnet Launch]
14. Received grant to build Elixir Integration
15. Oracle Aggregator v1 [Mainnet Launch]

1. AMM v1 [Devnet Launch]

Our first major milestone of 2023 was launching our first product onto Sui Devnet. Up until this point we had a vision, and a strong team, but nothing concrete to show for it. Launching our AMM (prior to the launch of Sui Mainnet) was our way to show the world that we could build quality products and deliver on what we promised we would.

Our AMM was, and still is, different from every other DEX on Sui in that we offer pool compositions of up to 8 assets and provide both uncorrelated and stable swap pool types. We opted for this route after identifying the liquidity fragmentation issues that arise from having multiple representations of the same underlying caused by the various bridges integrated with Sui.

In order to allow users to perform the actions they wanted to, there needed to be a way to ensure it didn’t matter what chain you came from. Our AMM helps solve this problem, and after a year it’s clear our thesis was correct: our pools consistently act as a convenient avenue to enter the Sui ecosystem.

Related Twitter posts:

• Launch Thread

2. Capy Staking [Testnet Wave 2]

Although only lasting for a few weeks, Capy Staking is something we are proud of and think is worth highlighting for a couple of reasons. First of all, it was not something that we had planned on building. Rather, it was a response to what we noticed from the Sui community, which was that we were all really enjoying the Sui Capys NFT collection.

We had an internal discussion and decided it would be interesting to build a product tailored around these NFTs. The purpose behind this product was twofold; it acted as a way to drive more users to our Testnet deployment, and also started laying the groundwork for future NFT integration into Aftermath.

A few days later it was complete and we deployed our Capy staking vault to Sui Testnet. These vaults allowed users to stake their Capys and earn fees from other users breeding their own Capys with those in the vault. This functionality greatly expanded upon that of the official Capy dApp, which only allowed breeding between two Capys owned by a single user.

We were able to showcase our ability to quickly respond to market demands by deploying products that users want. Overall it was a very fun experiment, and a bit of a tease of things to come in the NFT domain.

Related Twitter posts:

• Launch Thread
• Recap Thread

3. Router v1 [Testnet Launch]

After deploying our AMM, we wanted to make Aftermath the de facto place to go to ensure you get the best price for any swap you want to execute on Sui. It was clear that we would need to bootstrap multiple liquidity pools, and it just isn’t realistic to have the most liquid pool for every single asset, nor to expect a user to always calculate the most optimal path when trading between any two assets. In order to ensure the best swaps for our users, we needed to integrate every other sufficiently liquid DEX on Sui into our router… So that’s exactly what we did.

A user who comes to Aftermath to trade one token for another can be ensured that our router will search every Sui DEX with enough liquidity, and find the most optimal path between the two. Routes can even be split up so that 50% goes through one path, 25% through another, or any other combination which provides the best final swap price.

There is truly no reason to perform a swap anywhere other than Aftermath because if another DEX offers a better price we will route you through them anyway.

Related Twitter posts:

• Launch Thread

4. Validator Genesis Ceremony

Being one of the first teams building on Sui gives us great pride, in addition to the added expertise our developers have with Sui Move from being so early. We have always wanted to support the ecosystem and help it grow, so we were honored to be chosen as one of the 105 genesis validators of the Sui network and to participate in its Mainnet genesis event.

Sui was officially born on May 3rd, 2023, and Aftermath has been processing transactions since day one. It’s just another way for our team to be intimately involved with the Sui network and a responsibility we are proud to take on.

5. First Contract Ever Published on Sui Mainnet

This one is a bit of an Easter egg but something we think our community will appreciate. Before Sui Mainnet officially went live, the very first contract published to the network was published by Aftermath and contains an inside joke for our community. It was a fun way for Aftermath to celebrate the launch of Sui Mainnet, and write our names in the history books as the first to deploy a contract on our home chain.

6. AMM v1 & Router v1 [Mainnet Launch]

Sui Mainnet launch was a huge milestone as it meant we could release our AMM and Router to a monetary, production environment.

We were thrilled to see that both retail and our partners on the builder side found our products useful and wanted to collaborate. We steadily added new pools and new features, integrated more DEXs into our router, and saw our volume and TVL grow throughout the year.

Seeing real users utilizing our first products reinvigorated our efforts to continue pushing forward and roll out several more products in 2023.

Related Twitter posts:

• Launch Thread
• New Pool [afSUI/SUI]
• New Pool [SUI/USDC]

7. afSUI v0.1 [Testnet Launch]

Ah, afSUI v0.1, or what we might more accurately refer to as “the saga of afSUI.”

To keep it brief, we always believed in the usefulness of liquid staking, but initially it was impossible to build a fully decentralized LSD on Sui. It required centralized, off-chain elements — the polar opposite of our ethos at Aftermath — due to the architecture of native Sui staking and some of its constraints.

We voiced our concerns and pushed ahead building what was a non-ideal LSD solution but ultimately one that was the best (in terms of decentralization) we could do with the existing technology.

When we completed building afSUI v0.1, there was a growing interest in Sui liquid staking derivatives and the possibility arose of rebuilding our implementation the way we originally intended through the enactment of a Sui Improvement Proposal (SIP).

8. SIP6 (First SIP)

The Sui Network can be modified and updated through a community upgrade process known as a Sui Improvement Proposal (SIP). After already implementing afSUI v0.1, we intimately knew the limitations of Sui’s original staking mechanism and what changes would be required to enable a more decentralized, non-custodial liquid staking protocol.

The key motivation was to to remove the requirement of a centralized account to custody the protocol’s supply of StakedSui by enabling StakedSui to be held by another shared object.

Our CTO Kevin wrote the SIP, which you can find here if you are in it for the tech and this sort of thing interests you. It was the first SIP that went from proposal to release on Sui Mainnet and marked another milestone for Aftermath and our pioneering spirit on Sui.

The end result of SIP6 is that afSUI is fully decentralized, and requires minimal trust nor custody from Aftermath. Users stake and receive afSUI all completely on-chain, thanks to SIP6.

9. Found Bug in DeepBook

Unit testing and benchmarking are a significant part of our development process. Before we begin feeling comfortable sending a product to audit, we are obsessive about testing the products, including benchmarking them against other protocols.

We decided early on to build our own orderbook for our perpetual exchange, since no one had ever built a bespoke orderbook that took full advantage of Sui Move.

Through direct comparison of our own orderbook against DeepBook, a vulnerability in DeepBook was discovered. We immediately alerted the relevant parties, proposed a fix, and were rewarded a bounty for our efforts.

10. LSD Hackathon

From August to October, the Sui Foundation hosted an ecosystem-wide Liquid Staking Hackathon. As the forefathers of liquid staking on Sui, we were natural contenders to place in this hackathon. The hackathon consisted of two tracks: one for liquid staking protocols, and one for liquid staking DeFi and tooling.

We entered afSUI in the first category, and a modified version of our latest innovation, Dynamic Gas, in the second.

Dynamic Gas allows users to pay for transactions in a coin other than SUI, through the use of two Sui-native features: programmable transactions and sponsored transactions. This alleviates the requirement for anyone to hold SUI to transact on Sui; instead they can hold 100% afSUI, while earning staking yield on their entire portfolio, while using afSUI to pay for their transactions.

Aftermath placed 1st in both categories.

Related Twitter posts:

• Announcement Thread [@AftermathFi]
• Announcement Thread [@SuiNetwork]

11. afSUI v1 [Mainnet Launch]

Our next major milestone was launching afSUI on Mainnet pending completion of our audit. This was a major step and the culmination of all of the development time we committed to LSD v0.1, SIP6, and the final, current version of afSUI.

The community response to afSUI has been phenomenal, with afSUI becoming the dominant LSD on Sui, and the afSUI/SUI pool on Aftermath becoming the second most liquid pool on Sui.

We have a new feature that is soon to be released that will provide even more utility to afSUI, so be sure to stay tuned in the coming weeks. We are sure you are going to like it.

Related Twitter posts:

• Launch Thread
• Tutorial Thread
• Overview Thread

12. Dynamic Gas [Mainnet Launch]

In a nascent blockchain ecosystem like Sui, onboarding new users is paramount. One of the largest barriers to entry is ensuring that new users can easily onboard and start using dApps on the platform. Sui is quite intuitive to use, but not all users will necessarily have a SUI balance in order to pay for the gas cost of performing a transaction.

For example, if you have USDC on Arbitrum or on Solana, and you want to bridge to Sui, you can do so. But then you will need a balance of SUI in order to do anything on any Sui native protocol… Or do you?

Dynamic gas removes this need entirely. Bridge over USDC, ETH, or SOL? You can use that as gas.

Through programmable and sponsored transactions, you can use afSUI, USDC, or USDT to pay for your transaction’s gas thus removing one of the largest barriers of entry for new users.

Dynamic Gas combined with zkLogin present the ability to completely abstract away the fact that a user is interacting with a blockchain.

Our thesis is that it shouldn’t matter to users what chain they are on any more than it matters what cell tower their phone is connected to. As long as it is simple to use and offers the best experience, that’s where the users should be.

Dynamic Gas is a big step in that direction, which is why we prioritized it and launched it as soon as we did.

Related Twitter posts:

• Launch Thread
• Overview Thread
• Supported Coins [Wormhole USDC & USDT]

13. Perps [Testnet Launch]

Building a fully on-chain perpetual protocol was always our goal and what ultimately led us to building on Sui.

It simply hasn’t been possible to build something like this, even a couple of years ago. As avid traders, we are intimately aware of the drawbacks of existing hybrid CEX/DEX perp protocols with off-chain matching. We wanted to build the next generation of perps DEX which offers greater transparency, censorship-resistance, and user experience.

This was no small undertaking, and required us to build a bespoke matching engine written in Sui Move and designed to execute fully on chain.

We have launched our v1 on Sui Testnet for our community to try out and provide their feedback, while we undergo audits, continue to test and deploy some final improvements.

Beyond the back-end architecture, we have spent a lot of time iterating on the user experience to ensure every trader has all of the information they need prior to executing a trade.

Perps UI’s suffer from two downsides: (1) marketplaces need to display a lot of information to their users and (2) experienced traders like to see different information than new traders do.

We have tried to build a UI that appeals to both, by allowing them to see exactly how placing a new order or modifying an existing one will affect their positions. On top of this, our UI is largely customizable to your preferences, so be sure to try that out.

We have put a lot of thought into this, but we are always keen to hear what our users think. Please test it and let us know what you think of the experience.

We want Aftermath to be the most intuitive place to trade, with the most markets and the best prices. Knowing what our community wants is a key step to us achieving our goal.

Related Twitter posts:

• Launch Thread

14. Received grant to build Elixir Integration

As an orderbook-based perpetual exchange, obtaining liquidity on our books — to ensure proper depth and tight spreads for traders — is paramount. For this reason, we have been developing simple-to-enter strategies to onboard both institutional and retail users as market makers.

The typical retail user is not savvy enough, nor has sufficient capital to run their own market maker strategy on a highly competitive orderbook. To this end, we’ve created vaults which will run the strategy on their behalf. All a user has to do is deposit into the vault and sit back to earn profits from market making activity and liquidations.

This is something that we have been working on since early 2023, so it made perfect sense to extend the work we had been doing already to an existing community of retail market makers: Elixir.

We’ve since been awarded a Development grant to build out the Elixir Sui Move integration for DeepBook’s spot markets. This integration is extensible to allow Elixir to market make on many Sui-native venues, ranging from our own perpetuals orderbook, to DeepBook, to any other Sui protocol which uses a similar, orderbook-based architecture.

This integration is good for Aftermath and the greater Sui ecosystem alike. It’s another example of Aftermath building tooling which is sorely needed and will help all of Sui, which is our ultimate goal.

15. Oracle Aggregator v1 [Mainnet Launch]

Reliable index prices are paramount for any perpetual exchange. As such, we prioritized building architecture that can integrate and aggregate price feeds from multiple data sources.

Currently, Aftermath obtains price feeds from Pyth and Switchboard, and we are in talks with other oracle services to add them once they are live on Sui Mainnet.

In addition to aggregating price feeds to ensure reliability, our oracle architecture allows Aftermath to be oracle-agnostic by not being reliant on only one oracle. This further enables us to create markets for exotic assets which may not have a standard type of price feed or are unique to a specific oracle.

This flexibility gives us the opportunity to create markets for pretty much anything our traders would like to speculate on. We will be deploying our first such exotic market onto Testnet soon, so be sure to stay tuned.

In addition, Aftermath is a Pyth publisher, allowing us to push our own price feeds on-chain to ensure we can quickly launch new markets based upon what our traders demand.

Conclusion

We are proud of all we have accomplished in 2023, and extremely grateful for our community who have supported us by using the products we have built.

We have exciting news to announce soon about what we will do to thank our earliest and current users, but that alpha will have to wait until our next article…

Thank you to everyone who has been with us so far, it has been very rewarding to show the world what we can do. We are still just getting started, so here’s to 2024!